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the address of the Labour. Get back with your cards before twelve.’
    There was no boredom those first days, though time was slower and there was more pain, drive to push the shovel in blistered hands with raw knee in the same time as the others, a shovel slyly jabbed against a thigh as if you’ve stumbled, and the taunt, ‘Too much wankin’ that’s what’s wrong,’ in the way fowl will peck to death a weakened hen; fear of Thursday, Barney’s tap on theshoulder. ‘You’re not strong enough for this job. You’ll have to look for something lighter for yourself. Your cards’ll be ready in the office at payout.’
    No fear of the tap on the shoulder on this or any Thursday now, shut mouth and patience and the hardening of the body. My shovel drove and threw as mechanically as any of theirs by now.
    ‘What time is it?’ I asked Keegan. He fumbled in his pocket for the big silver watch wrapped in cloth to protect it against the dust. He read the time.
    ‘Another fukken twenty minutes to go,’ Galway said in the exasperation of the burden of the slow passing of the minutes, a coin for each endured minute.
    ‘Another fukken twenty minutes,’ I repeated, the repetitious use of fukken with every simple phrase was harsh at first but now a habit. Its omission here would cause as much unease as its use where ‘Very kind. Thank you, Mr Jones’ was demanded.
    ‘There’s no fukken future in this job,’ Keegan complained tiredly. ‘You get old. The work is the same, but you’re less able for it any more. In other jobs as you get old you can put the work over on others.’
    ‘No sign of Jocko yet.’ Galway tried to change to Murphy. Galway wore a white handkerchief knotted at both ends to keep the dust out of his Brylcreemed black hair.
    ‘I’ll give him his future when he comes,’ Murphy said as he sledged the back of the hopper.
    ‘The childer go to school and they’ll have better than me,’ Keegan kept on at what was felt as nagging rebuke. ‘They’ll have some ambition. That’s why I work behind this bloody mixer and the woman chars. So that they can go to school. They’ll have some ambition. They’ll wear white collars.’
    ‘Pork chops, pints of bitter, and a good old ride before you sleep, that’s fukken ambition,’ Murphy left off sledging to shout, and when he finished he laughed above the mixer.
    ‘That’s right,’ Galway agreed. ‘Come on, Keegan: shovel.’
    ‘I’ll shovel with a jumped-up brat any day,’ Keegan answered with the same antagonism, but fell behind, sweat running down from under the hat.
    ‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ Murphy trumpeted as he saw the competition, and then at last the hooter blew.
    We passed the Negro demolition crew as we went to the canteen,the wood from the houses burning fiercely behind the bulldozer. On the roof two Negroes hacked away slates with pickaxes. The prostitutes lived in the condemned row, moving from empty house to empty house ahead of the demolition. Limp rubbers floated in the gutters Monday mornings while they slept in the daylight.
    Through the hatch in the canteen Marge handed out ham or tomato rolls and mugs of tea.
    ‘Ta ta, Pa,’ she said as I gave her coins. This had been hardest of all to get used to, to have no name at all easier than to be endlessly called
Pa.
    ‘Thanks, Marge.’ It angered me that there was still the bitterness of irony in my smile, that I was not yet completely my situation; this ambition of mine, in reverse, to annul all the votes in myself.
    I sat with the rest of the mixer gang at a trestle table. Behind us the chippies played cards. The enmity glowed sullenly between Galway and Keegan, but Galway ate his rolls and gulped tea without lifting his head from the racing paper, where he marked his fancies with a stub of pencil.
    I read aloud out of the local
Herald
my mother sent me each week from home that prayers had been ordered in all the churches in Ireland for good weather. It had rained all